 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Logan Larson, Jake, Mike Aikens, and our lifetime supporter, Mark Olson. Thank you, Mark! On this episode of DTNS, does open AI really need trillions of dollars for the future of semiconductors? Also, is the future of ex-exclusive video? And Aunt Pruitt tells us how social media helps or hinders him as a small business owner. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, February 9th, 2024. From Studio Animal House, I'm Sarah Layton. From Columbus, Ohio, I'm Rob Dunwood. I'm drawing the top tech stories in Cleveland. I'm Len Peralta. I'm the show's producer, Roger J. And joining us is Aunt Pruitt, photographer, friend of the show, and creator, looking for gigs. Hi, Aunt. Hello. How y'all be? We all be good. We be good. It's good to have you. It's all good. Excellent. It's really good to have you. Aunt's going to talk about social media strategies as a small business owner, which I know a lot of our audience will really, really appreciate. But in the interest of time, let's start with the quick hits. Ring is raising its prices. In a company's support article, beginning at March 11th, 2024, Ring said it will now cost $4.99 monthly, or $49.99 yearly, to subscribe to the Ring Protect Basic Plan. That's an increase of $1 a month, or $10 a year. Basic, which is Ring's cheapest plan, gives you access to cloud storage of recorded videos from one camera or video doorbell. If you subscribe, you'll see the bump on your next renewal date after March 11th, unless you cancel before that. Apple is changing how persistent web apps or PWA's work under enforcement of the European Union's Digital Markets Act. The second beta release of iOS 17.4 includes code to accommodate the DMA, where PWAs have been demoted from standalone apps that use the whole screen, the shortcuts that are open within the default browser. The register notes that this change will cause users to lose local data in existing web apps because web apps and Safari have different storage locations. And it will also break notifications because there's no way to enable notifications without app installation. A lot of people not thrilled about this change. Not at all. We mentioned on the show yesterday that Disney is buying a stake in Epic, a minority stake, but a stake nonetheless. The information now reports that Disney's $1.5 billion investment in Epic Games will give Disney a 9% stake in Epic at a valuation of $22.5 billion. That's down 29% from Epic's valuation in 2022 of $31.5 billion. Disney also announced a new AI-based advertising tool dubbed Magic Words, which introduces a new form of contextual advertising for the Disney Plus and Hulu streaming services that will also help brands tailor their commercials to fit the mood of specific scenes within a movie or television series. Disney said the feature allows advertisers to maximize the impact of their messages because it resonates with concepts that the viewers experience. How varied advertising of them. In a statement at the ACLs, Meta said it will not proactively recommend political content from accounts that you do not follow on threads. This is the same policy the company uses to regulate political content on Facebook and Instagram. Thread users will be allowed to follow accounts that post political content, but the algorithm that suggests content from users you don't follow will not recommend accounts that post about politics. Reuters sources say NVIDIA is building a new business unit focused on designing chips for a cloud computing firms and advanced artificial intelligence processors. NVIDIA currently controls about 80% of the high end AI chip market with customers including open AI, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, the big guys. NVIDIA's H100 and A100 chips serve as a generalized all-purpose AI processor. However, the companies have started to develop some of their own internal chips to overall lower cost and reduce energy consumption. So NVIDIA is coming back. All right, well, speaking of open AI sort of, the Wall Street Journal sources say that Sam Alton, who heads up open AI is in the process of raising trillions. That's trillions with a Tate. Trillions of dollars to reshape the global semiconductor industry with potential investors, including the United Arab Emirates helping boost the world's chip building capacity to expand its ability to power AI. All right, that all sounds like a lot of gobbledygook. This would reportedly solve constraints to open AI's growth because you need more chips to grow, including the scarcity of the pricey AI chips required to train large language models behind AI systems like chat GPT. Now, Tom mentioned in his TechTom newsletter, and it's a good one, subscribe if you haven't already. This isn't really about building a new chip business. It's about persuading governments, chip companies, and other organizations that have money to build more chip capacity because open AI needs the chip capacity. What do you guys think? This one is really interesting to me, and I look at it like this. Everything AI is really hot right now. So if any time is good to ask, now is the time to ask. This is probably one of the reasons that Sam Alton had the issues that he had back in November, December, where the board kind of ousted him, but because they were going after too much cash. Well, they ousted him. Well, yeah, they didn't, kind of, they definitely did. But this is one of those situations where AI is so hot and it's not, we need this money to build a factory. He's talking about we wanna increase capacity everywhere on earth. So the best way to do that when you're talking about trillions with a T, the only way to do that really is to talk to governments. And I think that that's where this message was targeted. Well, not only did he talk to governments, but he talked to the big dogs when it comes to the money government, the UAE. This is serious business, and it's pretty gutsy to say, hey, let's all join together and get this done. But what's not mentioned or really considered here is all of the potential backlash for all of the folks that are about a greener planet, if you will. We get a lot of lack about our cars out here that are running the combustible engines, there's a big push even here in California for going to EV cars because of the planet. But yet, we wanna build this big huge factory and there's a lot of resources that's gonna have to be pulled to get this job done. And I'm pretty sure there's a pretty massive impact on the carbon footprint, if you will. 100%. Roger, I know we were all kicking this around before the show and the idea of reshaping semiconductors, I mean, maybe that's the goal. If you have enough money, sure, go forth, open AI. Ant's note is very real, the fact that these take an immense amount of power, electricity, all sorts of stuff that pulls from the grid. And something like open AI simply can't scale unless they have that, right? I mean, there definitely is a limitation or a throttling effect around having not enough of these chips that they use in AI. Now, when you get into the topic of supply chain for chips, I mean, there are a myriad of issues you need to work through, which, I mean, maybe he talked to the potential investors, talked to government agencies about restrictions and stuff, but you have a very, and I'm gonna use this word because it was mentioned in a chat GPT article we did this week, a tapestry of conflicting interests that overlap all of this, whether it's geopolitical. If you increase the supply of chips, do those chips go to governments or non-government entities that you don't want having them because they can integrate them into either a weapon or some other, you know, a competing device? And then you talk, then you have like the actual brass taxes. It takes five years roughly to get a plant up and running and producing at scale where it's producing chips. And it really depends on which process you're using because it's not just an issue of getting the machines, getting the building, getting the water, getting the electricity, it's also good to do this. I mean, that's all stuff that the money would help with the infrastructure, but it doesn't just happen because you have the money. Yeah, but like, and then where do you spend the money, right? Which area of the globe gets to have that onrush of money? Because now you're gonna have a bunch of places like localities saying, hey, you should invest money with us, not them, because we'll build your chips, we'll sell it to anyone. And then the people, the money's like, well, maybe we don't want you to sell it to everyone. And then you have the whole business issue of just having a bunch of plants. What happens when chip demand goes down? Now you're sitting on a factory that isn't making anything and costing you millions of dollars just to keep running. Or, you know what I mean? There are business cases that are outside of OpenAI's business case that need to think about, hey, yeah, it's great, we'll sell you a bunch of chips. What happens in five years if OpenAI gets acquired or artificial intelligence goes through another change and it doesn't require this level of hardware? Now we're gonna have excess capacity and now we're gonna have people undercutting each other trying to sell your chips in the same way that when you have an overcapacity of, say, steel production, you have one country underbidding another in order to get rid of excess stock. You know, and again, you have to consider who's gonna benefit from this. As I mentioned in our pre-show, who's gonna be working in this facility? How much are they gonna earn? Is it gonna be a fair wage? Are they gonna be working 20-hour days? All of that stuff has to be considered. And at the end of the day, it sounds more like just a huge benefit for OpenAI and not anyone else or maybe I'm wrong. What are your thoughts? Well, I mean, I feel like if you are a person that uses OpenAI products and, you know, you're bullish on AI, you kind of see this on the surface and go, sounds good. Yeah, let's ramp it up, you know? Let's, you know, let's open the floodgates. But there's a lot that has to go into that. A great point, you know, who's gonna work at these plants? Who's gonna build these plants? Are these plants going to be, you know, does it make the most sense? Even when we're talking about trillions of dollars, if you're talking about more than one plant, you're gonna get there pretty quickly. Just a note, the financial time sources say that OpenAI's revenue annualized hit two billion in December, December of 2023, that was up from 1.3 billion in October of 2023. So quite a bump, quite a bump, even though the company itself had a executive shuffle going on in December, the company does now say that it thinks it can more than double that two billion figure by 2025. So again, not talking trillions, but we're talking, we're talking, you know, four billion-ish. And yeah, you know, again, just one company doing this, but boy, if they get that, they get that investment, it's going to change the landscape. Like, what's even a unicorn anymore if you're talking trillions of dollars? And just remember, a trillion is a thousand billion. So it's a lot of money. And they said trillions with a T on the front and an S on the back. It's a lot of billions. All right, Rob, let's talk about X. What's going on at X? Let's talk about X because about a month ago, Elon Musk declared X, the long-time home of brief text-based musings, it had become a video-first platform. Now, many believe that this was just another case of Elon being an Elon and kind of wrote the idea off simply something to get people talking about. But today, X and the WWE have partnered to make X the exclusive home of the WWE Speed. It's a new weekly series of time matches, I believe they're five minutes or five minutes or less and they feature your favorite WWE superstars set to launch this spring. Now, this is in addition to video deals that X has struck with Paris Hilton, Tucker Carlson, Don Lemon, Tulsi Gabbard, Jim Rome, just to name a few. And X is also working to incentivize top line or should say top online creators to post on the platform through improved ad revenue share deals. If you guys remember back in, believe it was the end of last month, Mr. Beast tested posting or reposting one of his videos on X and that video made over $260,000 in the time they were doing the test. Now, Mr. Beast did say that he thought it was a bit of a facade because he thought that advertisers were basically buying that particular video in particular because they knew that it was going to be popular. But it kind of gets to questioning, you really have to start thinking about this. Do we need to start thinking about X in terms of like a YouTube or TikTok or Twitch or an Instagram when it comes to creating short form or maybe not so short form video content? Mr. Rod, can you help me understand Mr. Beast, his experiment, was it just, was it a native posting there on the platform? So they took a video that they had already shot for YouTube, but they did repurpose it for X. So I think that there might have been some additional editing and stuff like that for the platform. And it did incredibly well, like you would expect it to. There were even folks who were saying that the X was artificially inflating it. But Mr. Beast, as I said, he came out and said that it's probably because people knew that the video was going to be popular on that platform and they just bought more space to run next to that. But so yeah, he's the biggest YouTuber on earth doing this, but there's going to be smaller folks who are going to look to this platform as well. If X is doing better deals, clearly people are going to go to X. So I'm just curious, is this going to be a real thing for them, is video going to be a real thing? And are you a WWE fan? Not like I used to be back in the old 80s, but I gotta tell you. But you know, maybe more than somebody who's not at all. Yeah, that WWE runs deep for that fan base. They are hardcore and they will do whatever that brand asks them to do. If it means downloading a new app on their phone called X that they've never had or even thought about, I guarantee they're going to do it. That is, that's what I think. These exclusives for fans who are, if you're a fan, you're really, really a fan. This is if you can only get fun WWE speed content on X, that's where you're going to go. And yes, as you mentioned, Rob, there are other kind of celebrities and people in media who have struck deals with X for certain video content. This reminds me of, I don't know, the like cord cutting wars that we're going through right now. It's like, where do you want to watch your content? Do you want to watch it on X? Do you want to watch it on TikTok? Do you want to watch it on Instagram? Do you want to watch it on Blue Sky? Do you want to watch it somewhere else? As a consumer, you don't really care. You're just like, tell me where to watch it. And that's where I'll watch it. And if I have to pay too much, I'm going to be mad about that whole thing. Yeah. This is why, oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead, Ian, go ahead, Ian. Well, I'm going to sound like a bit of a Luddite or an old man here, but this stuff still just sort of blows my mind. The idea of consuming content, long content, on social media, which is most of the time on a computer or on a mobile device, but at the same time, Apple put the first episode of Silo, Hugh Howie's series up on Twitter last year and it got millions and millions and millions of views. And I'm like, who in the heck is watching this stuff on X? But I guess that's the new thing. Are you all watching stuff on your mobile devices or are you spending the time on a couch like myself and watching it on a regular size television? It's a little of everything. But again, like that kind of, it's like, it depends. Like if you and we're like, hey, if you've seen Silo, here's how you watch it. You have to watch it on X. I'd be like, okay, that's what I'll do. But it's kind of annoying, right? Because maybe I'm sitting at my living room and being like, can I just do everything on my smart TV? Right. So do you guys remember Quibi? I think it came out in like 2018 and then died in 2020. I think it was like six, seven years too soon. Because I honestly think, I know for a fact that WWE fans, they are some of the most loyal fans on earth. And there are people who may not have even heard of X, but if they think they can get some more WWE content on this thing called X, they will download that app for no other reason than to just watch that show. So from that standpoint, that is a real smart buy as far as X is concerned. That's a real smart deal because they know they're going to get eyeballs, you know, watching these five minute or less matches. Mm-hmm. That blows my mind. So folks, let's change gears a little bit. So if you want to watch Tom's Top Five, the show where Tom breaks down the top five things you need to know about technology, this week Tom counts down the top five tech headlines from 1924, 100 years ago. You can catch it at Daily Tech News Show on TikTok at DTNSPIX on Instagram and YouTube at youtube.com slash daily tech news show. All right, social media. Been under the microscope lately, in fact, as early as recently as the show. And everybody seems to have an opinion on which platform is best, which you be using, the ones you maybe shouldn't be using. But if you're running a small business, social media is not only important, but maybe the most important tool to connect with potential customers and clients and your approach might be a little bit different depending on who you're hoping to reach. Now, and we've got you here today and we're glad because you're in the middle of expanding your photography business. Yeah. So what sort of considerations do we take into account when we're in your situation and we have social media tools at the ready? Well, see for myself, the situation turned into, I am starting from scratch. You know, being here, I moved here from Carolina in 2019 and I left a lot of my book of business back on the East Coast. So I didn't have everything here. And you're for anybody who doesn't know, like you're in NorCal. Yeah, I'm in NorCal. And the thing is, starting from scratch in this brand new area with no family here and just a handful of friends, it is a challenge to put yourself out there. So the first thing that comes to mind is you need to jump on social media because that is one of the easiest way to do marketing without going out trying to hire a firm. And the firm looking at you like, we don't know who you are, we don't care who you are. So we're not gonna promote you. You need to promote yourself and social media is free to do that. The problem is not all platforms are created equally and some platforms people don't even really care about. I wrote a blog post the other day about Blue Sky when they announced that they're now open and not necessarily doing a whole invite only kind of thing. And it made me wonder, do anybody really care about that? Especially people that are in small businesses and trying to get a bigger book of business. Because in my opinion, and I'm gonna go ahead and apologize now on Daily Tech News fans here, Blue Sky is a little bit too technical and a little bit too nerdy for normal folks out there. So I don't know that they're gonna flock to it. And I think that might be quite all right because maybe their audience isn't there. But again, you could say that about X, you could say that about Instagram, you could say that about TikTok. Everybody shouldn't be on TikTok even though TikTok is massive and getting a lot of traction, but your audience may not be there. And that's the type of stuff that you have to consider when it comes to marketing. Where is your tribe, if you will? I mean, when you talk about TikTok, I have a TikTok account. I consume a fair amount of TikTok content just because I wanna know what's going on. I don't feel like I can make TikTok content that other people are going to love. Maybe it's not that I'm not capable of trying, but I'm just sort of like, there are only so many hours in the day. You kind of have to choose your place. If you and want to further your photography business, it's like, where are the photo folks? Where is that tribe? And I think, yeah, it's I guess better than ever that we have so many options, but it's also harder than ever to be like, let's collate all these folks. Let's get to like one little subreddit where we all talk about the same thing all day. Well, it is harder because we do have all of these different platforms out there to consider, but fortunately, there are some tools out there to make it easier to sort of post once and it goes everywhere. And you know, myself, I do that. And there's a lot of times where one post is going everywhere and there's a lot of times where that post is only going to specific platforms because I've sort of figured out by looking at analytics of the platforms what people are clicking on, what people are commenting on or resharing, reposting and what have you because all of that stuff matters when it comes to converting them into a paying client. I sell prints and I know exactly where my prints get the most clicks and that usually equates to more sales because the more clicks are over there and that platform is X. Most people will say, you should do this on Instagram. Well, Instagram hasn't done squat for my photography. You kind of have to follow the money, right? Yeah. But I post to X. LinkedIn used to be my favorite platform because I got nothing but direct calls from there. You know, people were, especially the beginning of the year, new headshots, call your boy up. I got you perfect on LinkedIn. Yeah, as a small business owner myself, I have basically looked at social media as I'm gonna go with one or two platforms that I kind of rock with and kind of have found an audience. And that's just what I roll with. Now, I may use some of those third-party tools to post kind of everywhere, particularly when it's text. Text is fairly easy to kind of put on all platforms that accepts text, gets a little bit wonkier when you're trying to do short form video and stuff like that. But ultimately, I think that it just kind of makes sense to go where your audience is. And I know there's a lot of folks who are on Mastodon, who are on Blue Sky. That's in the news this week. But when I've gone to the platform, there's just not enough people that I actually talk to. And I'll be honest, I'm just not willing to do an enormous amount of work to try to find an audience on a platform that only has a couple million people. If you have a couple hundred million, then that work to me is more beneficial. So like I said, I know folks are saying, the cringe is like, well, I really like this. But it's like, yes. But even with Blue Sky adding, I guess it's close to two million users in the last couple of days, there's still a rounding air compared to even threads that just came out not even a year ago. I mean, it just came out in July of last year. And clearly threads had the Instagram hookup to where they were able to just kind of port those accounts over. But when you're talking about critical mass, you kind of have to go where just most people are. So for the conversations that I'm having, I can have, and I've had great conversations on Masternod. I've had a conversation or two on Blue Sky, but most of my people are on Instagram. Most of my people are on X. Most of my people are on threads. So that tends to be where I'm going to spend most of my time. Now I'm of the mind of don't just throw these different platforms away, at least try them for a little bit, you know, because you never know something they spark. But again, try it for a little while to get enough data to see if it's worth your time or not. You know, because maybe one day Blue Sky is going to get pretty daggum big. Who knows? I don't know if I'm there yet because if I open up Blue Sky and search for Apple, what I will find is people talking about Apple, but I won't find an official Apple account. If I go in there and search for Taylor Swift, I will find people talking about Taylor Swift, but I won't find an official Taylor Swift account. So if they're not over there, I can't say that I can put a lot of faith in it being fruitful for me because those people draw into masses, you know what I mean? Yeah, they do. I mean, Rob, you've also, you know, you've talked about just kind of like on the ground marketing wear a t-shirt saying ask me about my podcast and that has actually turned into a lot of people knowing about the podcast that you do. That's right. Absolutely. And here's one of the things I do wanna make sure that folks understand this and I believe, and I don't wanna put words in your mouth, but you're coming to this from a, for a small business person standpoint, not necessarily just where do you personally rock? And that's definitely how I look at social media from a small business person standpoint. You kind of have to go where there's just eyeballs because you're ultimately trying to generate leads at the end of the day. And if just, if there's a, you know, decreased number of people on the platform because it's new or just came out, you're just not gonna do as well as you would on a platform that has hundreds of millions of people on it. Yeah. I can't say I'm going over on LinkedIn just to chat about the Super Bowl that's coming up this weekend. I can't do that on that platform. I mean, you could. I could, but I'm probably gonna get laughed off that platform, but if I'm over there to talk about, all right, folks, this is the beginning of the year or you're getting ready to get that new gig or you're thinking about or changing careers or what have you, look me up, let's work on your brand and make sure your photos look good and let's work on some videos to help promote yourself. That's what I'm gonna talk about over there because it's all about booking more business for me so I can continue to pay bills and eat. There you go. Because I like to eat. Small business owner. You know, we've all been there, speaking of small business owners, let's check in with Len Peralta who has been drawing a tech story that we've been talking about. Which one did we choose? Well, you know, I am a big proponent of social media and I use it for myself, for my art stuff, but I fell off big time just in general. I've been busy, but also I've kind of lost interest in social media, which isn't great for when you're looking to talk about your business. Yeah, exactly. But this image I drew today is called anti-social media, which is, you know, this is kind of how I feel, you know? I just don't give a darn about any of these places because there's no engagement, there's nothing. And so that's why I love being on DTNS because it's the one time where I actually am able to talk about my stuff and hey, it's worked up to a certain point. I love that. Not that people don't like elephants or ebbs or clouds. It's just, you know, again, so many hours in the day. Exactly. Thank you, Len. If they want to get this, by the way, let me do the social media thing. If they want to get this, they can go to my patreon, patreon.com, slash Len, or if they just want to support me at my online store, it's lennparaltastore.com and look for me online if you can. It's at lennparalta everywhere and hopefully we'll engage at some point. Well, thank you, Len. And also thank you, Ant Pruitt. So, Ant, tell the folks where they can get at you. How can folks find you online and what are you doing these days? Yeah, you can check me out on my website. I prefer that you go to antpruitt.com slash blog to keep up with everything that I'm doing there. You can even sign up for my quote-unquote newsletter. I can't even really say newsletter because I feel like I'm discredited. People that do newsletters really well, like Mr. Tom Merritt, but you can go there to sign up. Hey, you got a newsletter and rockets. It's all right. But yeah, go there and check out everything we're doing. And I'm on the social medias. I am antpruitt.com pretty much everywhere. Patrons, stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. It's time, again, for the great GDI debate. Join us as we try to answer the most confounding questions of all time ever in the universe. Oh boy, it's Friday. It's gonna be fun. Just a reminder, though, you can catch the show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 2100 UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live and we'll be back from the weekend on Monday talking about what happens when purchased copies of digital media get removed with Shannon Morse joining us. Talk to you then. This week's episodes of Daily Tech News Show were created by the following people, host producer and writer, Tom Merritt, host producer and writer, Sarah Lane, executive producer and booker, Roger Chang, producer, writer and cohost, Rob Dunwood, video producer and Twitch producer, Joe Coons, technical producer, Anthony Lemos, Spanish language host, writer and producer, Dan Campos, science correspondent, Dr. Nikki Ackermanns, social media producer and moderator, Zoe Deterdine, our mods, Beatmaster, W. Scott Esquan, BioCow, Capt. Kipper, Steve Guadarrama, Paul Reese, Matthew J. Stevens, aka Gadget Virtuoso and J.D. Galloway, mod and hosting by Dan Christensen, music and art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looters, Mustafa A, Acast and Len Peralta, live art performed by Len Peralta, Acast support from Tatiana Matias, Patreon support from Don McNeil. Contributors for this week's shows include Allison Sheridan, Scott Johnson and Justin Robert Young. Guests on this week's shows included in Fruits and thanks to all our patrons who make the show possible. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Bob, I hope you have enjoyed this program.